Portfolio: Tom Shaw

Tom Shaw’s love affair with photography began at 12, when he and a group of friends took to hiking through the mountains of their native Scotland: “For those who’ve been to Scotland, you’ll know the beauty of it. We just immersed ourselves in the whole landscape, and the desire to illustrate that took hold of me.”

The discovery of a Getty Images book of sports photography while in college sparked a year of pestering the publication’s managing editor. “I phoned him every week until he finally relented,” Shaw says. When he got his opportunity, Shaw never looked back. He traveled the globe covering sports for Getty and spent 15 years as the English national cricket team’s official photographer before going out on his own in 2012.

Years of experience in different cultures and environments imbued him with a strong sense of place. “The appeal of golf is how the sport sits in the landscape,” Shaw says. “I tend to come at it from that angle. It’s similar with cricket. When you photograph cricket in India or Pakistan or Bangladesh, cricketers will talk about the ‘lovely grounds.’ And it’s the same with surfing—it’s nature. I’m attracted to the sports that are formed from the natural world. It’s the vastness of being outside, and certainly golf is the epitome of that.”

In shoots from the Scottish Highlands to the south coast of England and beyond, Shaw has elevated the pages of The Golfer’s Journal by giving our readers a sense of place and a new vision of golf’s ancestral home.

[Captions by the photographer]

“I spend most of my time just waiting and waiting, and then running like an idiot. If the sun comes out, I need to leg it: sit here, then go over there, then back over here. At the end of a shoot, I’ll look like I’m dying because I’ve run so much.”